4th Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network in Helsinki, Finland, 15-18 August

Far from limited to resource and energy question, recent extractivisms have linked up with manifold forms of land grabbing and cash-crop agriculture to create new agrarian questions of survival and justice in an era of runaway climate change. Crucially, many Indigenous Peoples, peasants, workers, and other groups have confronted the extractivist projects. Many of them have not only opposed place-specific projects but questioned the Nature/Society dualisms that have framed and legitimated the racialized, gendered, and colonial domination that has been fundamental to capitalism’s environmental histories. We are witnessing a new wave of challenges to capitalism as an ontological formation – a new ontological politics that confronts capitalism as a world-ecology of power, re/production, and nature.

Indigenous movements and extractivist projects - Social reproduction and extractivism - The financialization of commodities - Land grabbing - Representations of extractivism, class, and capital - Extractivism in the Global North - Environmental histories of resource and energy extraction - Imperialism and the Search for Cheap Natures - Labor movements and the labor process in extractive sectors - The feminist political economy and political ecology of extraction - Extractivism and climate change - Race, racism, and racial formation in extractivist projects and processes - Commodity frontiers - Global extractive industries and their politics - And other World-ecology related topics!